Manual

Introduction

Hello there and welcome to OTIS. Our goal is to provide the best way to for artists and catalog owners to showcase their music, and agencies to discover it.

To introduce you to our software, we’d like to start with a story.

Meet Joe

This is Joe. He runs the catalog licensing company SneakyGood Tunes, a catalog with about 1,500 songs. Mostly mellow synth-based instrumentals and, interestingly, bhangra jams.

He uses OTIS every day to make his job easier. To start, he makes sure that all of his latest tracks are uploaded into the system. He has all of his best tracks hosted in his public catalog, using OTIS’ simple interface to select which tracks he wants to show. To make it easier for his clients to find similar types of music, he has his tracks organized into albums based on genre. He also makes sure to keep all of his metadata up to date, both with the traditional text fields and the SoundMap technology that makes metadata as easy as dropping a pin. Sometimes he even creates new public playlists, usually themed in some way. That Christmas playlist got a ton of likes when he shared it on Facebook. And he still uses his pumping Workout Tunes playlist at the gym.

In the day-to-day running of his business, he gets lots of requests from his clients for new music for various pitches. When this happens, he sifts through his tracks to find the perfect tunes, and places them on private playlists, protected by a password. Other times he wants to be sure the client saw the playlist, so he creates a specific sharing link for them that will show him when they’ve visited it. And sometimes, for super-secret projects, he’s set it so only a specific OTIS user can see the playlist. It’s a good thing OTIS has so many options!

One of Joe’s best clients is Walter, who works at the RetroCool Agency, an advertising firm focused on the fedora and skinny tie industries. After Joe started sending Walter playlists, he decided to check out OTIS himself, and was delighted by what he found.

He discovered the Requests feature, which let him create new music submission requests for each new project that landed in his inbox. He could then send a link to these requests to all of his friends (like Joe) who have music catalogs to invite them to submit tracks. Sometimes he is interested in expanding his roster of musicians he works with, so he’ll make a public request that appears in OTIS’ Opportunity section.

Walter is able to take all of these submitted tracks and add them to private playlists that he can send to the companies he works with to get their feedback. It saves him so much time being able to do everything right in the same system!

In addition to agencies, Joe also works with a number of independent musicians, using his connections to get their music placed in advertisements. One of these is Lisa, who has a knack for writing catchy flute n’ bass jingles. To get new music from Lisa, he created an Artist Request for her that she can drop all of her new songs into. He can then go through her submitted songs and choose new ones to feature on his public catalog and playlists for his clients. It’s so much easier than the olden days of passing around massive, unsorted zip files and links to file hosting services that got lost in emails!

Once, Lisa submitted a song to Joe that turned out to be pretty popular. So popular, in fact, that another catalog licensing company she was working with placed it in spot for a coffee company that wanted exclusive rights to it. In the past, this could have been a problem, but Lisa was able to go in to OTIS and quickly remove the song from the different catalogs she had submitted it to. While his public catalog and playlists stayed exactly the same to end users, Joe was alerted to the song’s new unavailable status and was able to remove it himself.

So there you have it. The story of three people whose lives were made easier by a purple website.